Finding the Egg Pile

Today is one of my days to work from home. I took a break this morning to hunt for eggs with my wife. Yes, to hunt for eggs, right after Easter! There's a reason for the old Easter traditions.

We have two chickens and a rooster. They roost in a loquat tree right in front of our house every night, and in the morning they flutter down and march off around the back of the house into the woods. For a couple weeks now we hadn't been able to figure out where they were laying. So off we went, into the back yard, through my secret door in the fence, and farther back into the woods where it was obvious the chickens had been foraging and scratching a lot. No eggs.

My wife stayed on the inside of the fence, and I went along the outside, through the edge of our neighbors' yard, checking near an area where they used to lay; still no sign of eggs. Having pretty much given up, I kept walking along the fence so I could get to the end, where we have a gate... and there, in a small hollow behind some sort of palm bush, was a cache of twenty eggs.

Now I wouldn't be putting this in my blog if there weren't a moral to the story. The moral is that you often find answers when you stop looking in a particular place and instead browse and explore without preconceived notions of where the answers lie or what they are. Think of the woods where the chickens are laying as your data warehouse.

Ben